Assemblymember Chris Holden answering questions from the media at press conference at South Pasadena Metro Gold Line Station Thursday, February 9, 2017. Holden and a coalition of city councilmembers, community leaders, and non-profit organizations gathered outside Mission Street Metro Station announced the introduction of Assembly Bill 287. AB 287 finds a solution to the State Route 710 corridor gap between the I-10 and I-210 freeways and prohibits the construction of a freeway tunnel.“With billions of state dollars at stake and no hard evidence pointing to traffic relief for the San Gabriel Valley, (Photo by Walt Mancini/Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

A bill that would prohibit extending the 710 Freeway from the 10 to the 210 freeways by tunnel or surface route has failed, opening the door for a vote on the controversial project in May or June by the governing board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The bill was voted down in its first test in front of state Legislators on the Assembly Transportation Committee last week, opening a window for the long-sought-after option of drilling a car tunnel under northeast Los Angeles, South Pasadena and Pasadena to close the freeway’s 6.2-mile gap.

Despite granting Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, author of Assembly Bill 287, the option to bring the anti-tunnel bill back to the committee, Holden chose not to do so on Monday. That means the bill will most likely be dead for this year. Holden made it a two-year bill, meaning it could return in the future, he said.

Saying the bill would usurp local control, committee members said they preferred to see the 13-member Metro governing board make the decision, followed by Caltrans. Metro and Caltrans produced a draft Environmental Impact Report in March 2015 and held numerous public hearings on several options, including a tunnel that would cost between $3.15 billion and $5.65 billion.

While the EIR is not yet finalized, the board may update the report in May or June, said Rick Jager, Metro spokesman.

Many 710 watchers said the board could decide to remove the tunnel option from the EIR as the bill intended, leaving three other possible fixes: transportation demand management strategies ($105 million), a light rail line ($2.4 billion) or a bus rapid transit line ($204 million).

“There is still a high likelihood that the Metro board will do what this bill was intending to do,” Holden said.

For 60 years, communities and cities in northeast Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley have been locked in a battle over the freeway extension.

Cities of Alhambra, Monterey Park, San Marino, Rosemead and San Gabriel say a tunnel would finally finish the 710 up to the 210/134 interchange in west Pasadena. The 23-mile, north-south freeway begins in Long Beach, and despite signs advertising the “710 North Pasadena,” ends near Alhambra at Valley Boulevard, leaving motorists stuck on jammed surface streets.

“This is a bad bill. It is a bad idea,” said Alhambra City Councilwoman Barbara Messina. “They have to deal with this issue: There is only one alternative that meets and addresses the purposes of the EIR and that is the tunnel.”

The cities of South Pasadena, Pasadena, Glendale, Sierra Madre and La Cañada Flintridge strongly oppose the freeway extension, either on a surface route or underground. They say the tunnel project is a boondoggle that won’t help alleviate cross-traffic, because the tunnel would have no exits until it merges with the two freeways in Pasadena.

Losing Holden’s legislation was “a blow” but not a game-changer, said Pasadena Mayor Terry Tornek. He and others who testified in favor of the bill in Sacramento said they are working on getting the seven votes necessary from the Metro board to kill the tunnel.

“This was only one approach and it wasn’t successful. But there is a multi-pronged long-term effort (to stop the tunnel project),” Tornek said. “There is nearly universal recognition that this is not a fundable project.”

Indeed, the report from the committee meeting on April 17 when the bill was heard said even if Metro or Caltrans approved a tunnel, it may never get built. “It is doubtful that funding for the project could materialize anytime soon, if at all,” read the report under “committee comments.”

The committee called the $750 million set aside for congestion relief in a 2008 tax measure raising funds for transportation projects, better known as Measure R, would be “a drop in the bucket compared to eventual funding needs.”

Steve Scauzillo covers environment and transportation for the Southern California News Group. He has won two journalist of the year awards from the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing on environmental issues. Steve studied biology/chemistry when attending East Meadow High School and Nassau College in New York (he actually loved botany!) and then majored in social ecology at UCI until switching to journalism. He also earned a master's degree in media from Cal State Fullerton. He has been an adjunct professor since 2005. Steve likes to take the train, subway and bicycle – sometimes all three – to assignments and the newsroom. He is married to Karen E. Klein, a former journalist with Los Angeles Daily News, L.A. Times, Bloomberg and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal and now vice president of content management for a bank. They have two grown sons, Andy and Matthew. They live in Pasadena. Steve recently watched all of “Star Trek” the remastered original season one on Amazon, so he has an inner nerd.